500M users is a huge number, more than 1000x what Steem has today. Still what I struggle with is that more users doesn't necessarily mean a higher STEEM price. Only more buying of STEEM will increase the price and new users don't need to purchase any STEEM to participate, so if we get a bunch more users and they don't buy much STEEM then the price won't go up much.

If speculators buy STEEM as the user base increases only because they think the price will go up then that just creates a bubble which will end at some point and the price will go back down to some reasonable value based on the actual utility of the STEEM token.

So that's what I'm trying to figure out - the utility of the STEEM token and the value of that utility. To it's credit, STEEM is the only cryptocurrency I'm aware of that seems to be used for anything other than speculation - it's used to promote content, which is great. Based on the above post, it seems likely that SMTs will give it even more utility beyond that which should actually increase the value of the token itself.